


I Don't Know How to Love Him

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Advice, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Communication, F/M, Female Friendship, Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Missing Scene, Relationship Advice, Resolved Argument
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 09:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25468813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: A missing scene set after Ginny and Hermione disagree about Harry using Sectumsempra on Malfoy in the "Sectumsempra" chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Ginny feels badly about insulting Hermione's lack of Quidditch know-how, and they hash things out and then talk about Ginny's feelings for Harry. The title is taken from a song from "Jesus Christ Superstar."
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger & Ginny Weasley
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	I Don't Know How to Love Him

**Author's Note:**

> Ginny is a rather misunderstood character, at times, isn't she? Only upon re-reading all 7 books at the start of the global pandemic and its restrictions, do I feel that I understand her personality. Ginny is a trauma survivor who, after the ordeal of the Chamber of Secrets and the Horcrux's possession, eventually finds her voice and learns how to assert herself. Her feelings for Harry, however, and how to express them, pose a challenge that test the extent of her newfound confidence, and I think that explains a lot of her behavior. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy! Stay safe, and well:)

The words were out of Ginny’s mouth before she could stop herself, as she said heatedly, “Oh, don’t start acting as if you know anything about Quidditch, Hermione-you’ll embarrass yourself.”  
She watched Hermione’s face vacillate in its expression like a sky going from bright and blue to stormy, foreboding thunder. First, she looked shocked, and then her eyes darkened with fury. She looked not at Ginny, but through her, and Ginny felt embarrassment on two fronts-that she had spoken so cruelly to one of her only friends, and that she had stepped in to defend Harry, whom she thought she no longer had a pathetic crush on.  
Hermione turned her back to Ginny, with her arms folded.  
Ginny thought Ron would quickly say, “She didn’t mean it.” Or Harry. But, boys were spineless when girls argued. They considered it a different species of disagreement than when boys, or a boy and a girl rowed, and left girls to speak together in their native tongue of tears and emotions. They both shrunk, and Ginny felt her anger transfer to them. Especially Harry, whom she was defending…but, that was Harry-she never got back what she put in with that one. Feeling bitter, and the empowering, furious energy of her indignation draining to soggy, congealing shame and self castigation, Ginny went upstairs to the girls’ dorm alone.

As the rest of the evening passed, she realized just what the absence of Hermione as a friend felt like. Her brothers had teased her relentlessly about her popularity, but Ginny knew what that meant…it had nothing to do with having actual friends, they just thought she was a slag because she had started dating. She wasn’t popular at all-how could she be? She barely remembered her first year, and her second had been spent in paralyzing awkwardness from the guilt of knowing it was she who had unleased Slytherin’s monster on all her classmates. In third year, amidst the flurry of gossip about the Tri-Wizard tournament and its champions, and the mad scramble to secure a Yule Ball date, no one had asked her because they liked and wanted her-just Neville, who needed a date and saw her as safe because he knew her brother. Dumbledore’s Army had brough students from across Hogwarts’ houses together, in a rare way, united in a purpose and against an adversary, Umbridge. It had given so many people a second chance, to be someone new, to make new friends.  
Before the D.A., only Hermione had shown any real interest in her as a person-how she felt, and what she really liked. When Hermione discovered that Ginny purloined her brothers’ brooms for clandestine Quidditch practice, it became their secret-they had gone for star lit night flights in the vast countryside sky over Devonshire, and it became apparent that Hermione was great at staying on a broom in the air and flying a long distance, but scoring with a Quaffle and catching a Snitch were not her purview. She and Ginny had laughed about it, and lying in the grass of a hidden meadow Ginny had confided how hard it was to go on liking Harry when he seemed to notice her less and less.  
Ginny couldn’t talk to anyone else like that-not her room-mates, Gwendolen, Lavinia, and Margot, who had long ago decided the hierarchy of their room, and seemed to prefer her silence while they debated which boys were ‘fit’, ranking them and slandering the girls with petty gossip while brazenly copying Gwendolen’s homework. She was bright, but pretended not to be. No one in her year had warmed up to her the way Ron, Hermione, and Harry had each other. When she ate dinner at the Gryffindor table, it was clearer to her than ever that she didn’t have a friend like that, and that she didn’t have another friend like Hermione. Luckily, she knew where Hermione usually slipped off to after dinner, and resolved to make up with her.  
Ginny hadn’t wanted to go back to Hogwarts after her first year. Her dad was fine with homeschooling, but her mother had been adamant, that Ginny was going to face up to her fear and guilt after the diary and the Chamber of Secrets. She tapped into that place in her stomach, once again, where the courage to face what she had done lived, as she prepared to talk things out with Hermione. She had never felt such trepidation walking through the library doors, no matter how fearsome Madam Pince was about overdue books. She scanned the high ceilings and walls of shelves, and ancient oak tables, looking around for Hermione.  
When she found her, Hermione shut her book, ‘Our Days Are Numbered: Arithmancy, Portents, and You’, and looked at Ginny with skepticism. Ginny wasn’t surprised, but Hermione’s look, suspicious of her motives, readying herself for renewed hostilities, instead renewed her guilt. She had done that, broken the trust they had built as they discussed their feelings about boys, as they laughed about Hermione’s negligent Quidditch skills, as they fell asleep in Ginny’s room on long summer nights after staying up for hours talking about nothing and everything.  
“I don’t want to hear any more about that accursed book! I thought you, of all people, would be more cognizant than most of the dangers of trusting a sentient book, and it beggars all belief that you would call a spell that carved people up like a Christmas goose ‘good’, but if you’re that lacking in forethought or good sense in general, that’s your lookout,” Hermione said.  
She had never been on the end of one of Hermione’s verbal lashings before, and had found it funny when Ron was. Ginny wasn’t feeling any hilarity, now, she felt even worse. But, that was why she had spoken up, for Harry. She could see that with every passing second of Hermione’s remonstrance about using that hex on Malfoy and getting detention with Snape, he was feeling worse. His shoulders were sagging, his face was becoming stoic and drained of color, the way it was the last days of school after Sirius died. Ginny had ached to comfort him, to tell him how sorry she was, but what could she do?  
The biggest experience they had ever had together, the Chamber of Secrets, she was unconscious for, and he had, as he had told her, forgotten her part in it. They weren’t friends, for all they went to the same school, and spent every summer together. She just had this strong longing to be in his world, somehow, and it was growing stronger the further away from her, and from everyone and all matters of childhood, he was moving. He was closer to the world of adults, of people who had suffered, of people fighting a war, like her eldest brothers. Ginny was just beginning to get the hang of Hogwarts. Playing a sport and having a boyfriend had helped…but she still yearned to have something with Harry, although she didn’t have a word for what.  
Hermione was the most clever and mature of them-Ginny nearly prayed that Hermione understood her better than she, Ginny, understood herself, but she was clearly still affronted.  
“Hermione…I was just trying to help. I know how Harry feels…he trusted that Prince person like a friend, and it betrayed him. Just like….you know…” Ginny said.  
“Tom,” Hermione said.  
“You wouldn’t know what that’s like,” Ginny said. “You have real friends.”  
“Of a certain caliber, I suppose. I routinely find their number decreasing whenever I don’t agree with the general consensus, so that’s as far as friendship goes, I guess,” Hermione said coldly. “I suppose that’s better than the people who don’t speak to Muggleborns at all.”  
Ginny’s eyes widened. It was hard to think of someone with a personality as big as Hermione’s, so forceful, commanding, and sure of herself, as a minority, as someone who faced discrimination. But, of course…that was why Tom had pointed the basilisk at her, why Malfoy harassed her, why Snape discredited her contributions in class, why so many people shunned her. The same people who called Ginny’s family blood traitors for who their ancestors had married or had over to tea centuries ago hated Hermione for her very existence. What a lonely island that must be.  
“You know I don’t care about that!” Ginny pleaded.  
“I know,” Hermione said. “I just mean…its not as if I can just turn to anyone in this school, can I? So when you and Ronald decide I’m on the outs because I don’t find your general proclivity towards mayhem admissible…I end up here, don’t I? Alone.”  
“I know you have a tough time, in ways that I could never understand. I’m sorry. Harry…has this effect on me. I don’t want him to suffer. I want to find a way to make it all better for him. When I see him in pain…its like I feel it, too. But, he never even seems to notice me, let alone need anything from me. Sometimes, I make him laugh. And that feels good, its almost addictive. I know I say a bunch of daft things, to make him laugh. It feels so good to see him happy when he’s miserable like that,” Ginny said.  
Hermione sighed. “Ginny…I don’t think its fair to Dean for you to feel so strongly about Harry.”  
“Yeah, Dean said so, too-when he said we should just be friends,” Ginny said.  
Hermione winced. “Sorry. I didn’t think you two were over for good. And, if you did end it altogether, I figured you would be the one to call it quits,” she said.  
“Why?” Ginny asked.  
“Because you did with Michael,” Hermione said.  
Ginny nodded. “I tried to like Michael more than I actually liked him. I guess I was just glad that he liked me, that someone did, for the first time ever,” she said, and added, “Hermione, I don’t think that Harry using that spell or trusting that book was a good idea. But, I know how you can get to a place like that. I did. And, I did because I was lonely. I didn’t know how to make friends, and I didn’t know how to just be around Harry, and the school felt so big and confusing. I know Harry feels terrible, too. Has he talked to you and Ron, about Sirius?”  
“No,” Hermione said. “I think he feels too guilty. He feels like it was his fault.”  
“That’s not true! Tom tricked him! Its what he does, he tricks people! I wish….I wish I could tell him that,” Ginny said vehemently.  
“I know,” Hermione said. “The Half Blood Prince, whoever that is, was like a new friend that he could pour his heart out to, without worrying about being judged. But, whoever the Prince was, he or she was obviously into Dark Magic.”  
Ginny nodded. “Do you think they still go to Hogwarts? They could be here, now, still,” she said.  
“Now, there’s a thought…I scarcely wanted to touch the thing, so I didn’t have a proper look at who had signed it out previously,” Hermione said.  
That gave Ginny pause. Hermione thought it was a truly dark object, as dark as Tom’s diary. Ginny was doubly sorry she had defended Harry’s use of the spell from it.  
A silence ensued, since they could not retrieve the book from Harry without beginning the controversy over it once again.  
“It isn’t his fault, what happened to Sirius. Sirius was brave, and he loved Harry. He broke out of Azkaban to save him from Scabbers…I mean, Peter Pettigrew, and he lived in that cave up in the mountains just to visit him, sometimes. In a way, living in Grimmauld Place even though he had so many memories there, to be close to Harry, was brave, too. I never want to see the Chamber of Secrets, again. I think that house was Sirius’s Chamber of Secrets. He was so nice, at Christmas…” Ginny said, and added, “I made Mum cry.”  
“How?” Hermione said.  
“Before Harry got to our house, she told us to be careful around him, that he must still be cut up, over Sirius. She was saying it was a shame a good man had to die, and I said, ‘But, Mum, you hated Sirius!’ She burst into tears, and couldn’t talk. Dad came round to my room and talked to me later, and reminded me that he was their cousin,” Ginny said.  
Hermione gave her a sympathetic smile. “We think that we have time…to get angry at people, and make up. They disagreed over what Harry needed, but I guess that’s what happened to us today, too, isn’t it?”  
“But…now that he’s back, Tom, Voldemort, whatever he wants to be called, anything could happen, couldn’t it? One minute, Sirius was fighting Bellatrix LeStrange, the next minute, he was gone. We won’t be going back to his house for Christmas, again, or spending the summer there,” She said wistfully.  
“You didn’t actually like it there, did you?” Hermione said skeptically.  
“Well…it was interesting. All those weird little cursed objects. My brother’s a curse breaker, remember? He’s got all kinds of stories about cursed objects! Those sorts of things are kind of cool. There was this locket at Sirius’s house that I wanted to show Bill, but when he stopped by, I forgot all about it,” Ginny said.  
Hermione gave a wry smile, and said, “That’s probably for the best.”  
Ginny smiled, too, and she felt like they were back on a better foot.  
“Look, Ginny, I think the best thing for you to do is sort out just what you feel and just what you want from Harry,” Hermione said. “Do you feel friendship, admiration, empathy, pity, or sexual attraction?”  
“Hermione!” Ginny said, scandalized.  
“Well, it’s a possibility. Maybe you feel a little bit of all of that. If you want to say something to him, he’s never going to know until you say it directly to him. Taking up for him when you see he’s in conflict with someone else is just going to direct the attention at you, prolonging the incident, and probably making him uncomfortable. You may even make the third party involved angry at you,” Hermione said pointedly.  
“Point taken,” Ginny said.  
“And as for making him laugh…well, that’s all well and good, but calling Fleur and Luna names, and pointing out that I can’t play Quidditch or that Ron has the confidence of a Victorian child- laborer aren’t communication strategies, they’re cheap tricks,” Hermione said. “What usually happens after you make Harry laugh?”  
Ginny had to be honest. This conversation was getting more uncomfortable by the minute, like taking a bath in boiling water. But, she couldn’t jump out of the water-to make things better, she had to be honest.  
“He laughs, but its not like we go off alone for a walk in the orchard and talk about our deepest innermost thoughts. He just…goes off and does something else, talks to someone else. For a few minutes, I’m the center of his attention, then he forgets about me,” Ginny admitted. “and…sometimes, the person I’ve been talking about gets angry at me.”  
Hermione nodded emphatically. “The irony is…I think Harry would be more amenable than you think to talking to you. He does think of you, quite a lot,” Hermione said meaningfully.  
Ginny had noticed Harry looking at her, longer than usual. And it wasn’t when she was taking up for him, or making jokes at other people’s expense. Inexplicably, it was when she wasn’t doing very much, at all. Playing with Crookshanks or Arnold, or talking to someone else. It made her anxious to follow up and renew his attention with something impressive, emphatic…but, maybe she had been a little desperate.  
“Now, run along to bed. You’re officially the Seeker of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, that’s a central position that comes with a lot of scrutiny,” Hermione said…but, beneath her characteristically imperious tone, Ginny caught the catch of uncertainty beneath her tone, and in her eyes. She was uncertain that Ginny wouldn’t savage her again for talking about a sport that she didn’t play.  
In her quest to get Harry to like her, or at least look at her, Ginny saw that she had been harsh on others, in her thoughtless grabs to defend or attract him. Just like her mother, she had lashed out without thinking, trying to help but acting too heavy-handedly. She knew that she would have to gain Hermione’s total trust again…but, luckily, one thing Ginny knew how to deal with was guilt.  
“You’re right about that,” Ginny said, and Hermione smiled. Ginny did too, feeling relieved that their friendship was back on track.


End file.
